The last four posts in this series covered some very important record types for researching Pennsylvania German ancestors:  initial land purchases from the Penns, subsequent land transactions, probate records, and church records.  As I stated earlier, because Pennsylvania Germans were, after all, Pennsylvanians, additional Pennsylvania record types will also be...

When German-speaking immigrants arrived in America, they tended to settle in communities of German-speaking people.  Although the residents of a particular community may have come from different areas of German-speaking Europe, they had similar customs and similar ways of life that they retained for many years. At the same time,...

In the first post in this series, Heidi Mathis provided a great overview of the push and pull factors that motivated our Pennsylvania German ancestors to come to America.  In this post, I will answer the questions “How did they get here?” and “What happened once they arrived?”  I will...

  Are you one of the millions of Americans who have a German in your family tree? In an earlier series, Tracing Your 19th Century German Ancestors, I distinguished the largest wave of German immigrants to the U.S. who came in the 19th century from the smaller group who came...